Natalie Moore, a licensed therapist, explains why controlling emotions isn't the goal. Instead, she teaches clients to ride the waves of their feelings while building emotional tolerance, practicing self-care, and staying authentic. Emotions are human, they carry information, and they let us feel empathy.
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Hey guys, Natalie Moore, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist here, and today I'm gonna answer a common question that I get from new clients. Often when people come in to see me, they say that one of the things that they want to work on in therapy is learning how to control their emotions. And so I guess it's more of a statement than a question, but my And my response to this is I tell them, I say, "I'm so sorry, I actually can't help you control your emotions. That's not something that I can do or even want to do, and I don't think that that's something that actually promotes healing and living a full life." So what I do say is that what I would love to do and love to help them with is help them learn how to ride the waves of their emotions. Think of it like wanting to sail the ocean. If someone wanted to get into sailing, they wouldn't talk to their sailing instructor and say, "Hi, I want to learn how to control the ocean." They would say, "I want to learn how to sail. Can you teach me how to sail?" So I will get into a little bit of the reasoning why I actually don't teach people how to control their emotions and don't want people to control their emotions. One, I actually think that one of the biggest reasons why people do come into therapy is because they've actually been trying to control their emotions for so long, and it hasn't worked for them. They've gotten to a point where they're starting to experience negative outcomes in their life, in their relationships, at work, in various realms of life. And they've reached kind of that point where they, they're like, okay, I need help, I need professional help. And so part of my job is to help people actually learn how to sit with their emotions, name their emotions, take really good care of themselves when they're experiencing difficult emotions so that they can actually move through them and transform them. Okay, so that's the first part. Secondly, I actually think that emotions are what make us human and are life-affirming. You know, if I didn't have emotions, I wouldn't feel alive. I would feel like a robot. And so even though people come into therapy and they have a lot of difficult emotions that they want to learn how to better navigate. I think when they come in, they think that controlling their emotions would help them improve their lives. But once you are able to heal through traumas and grief and things from your past and able to develop more resources and tools for yourself in how to navigate those emotions, you actually wouldn't want them to go away because you develop a different relationship with them and you start to realize that they have wisdom within them. And then the third part that kind of figgybacks on what I said before, is that emotions are information for us. Have you ever just had that gut feeling inside when you knew something just wasn't right or wasn't a good fit? If you learned how to control your emotions, you wouldn't have any negative feelings. If we control— could control our emotions, we would just flip the happiness switch and say, oh, I just want to feel happy and joyful all the time. But, um, also that kind of feeds into the idea of we wouldn't really know what happiness is unless we experience sadness. We wouldn't know what calmness was unless we had experienced fear or anxiety. And so if you can figure out how to better live with, you know, the rainbow of emotions that we experience, not only can you better understand yourself, but you can also better understand others. So that's going to be the fourth reason why I wouldn't want people to be able to control their emotions, is because emotions allow us— it's the common language that we have as humans, and it's what ties us together, and it's what allows us to experience empathy for others, is having emotions. So then your next question might be, well, what's the goal then in terms of therapy and, you know, better dealing with these emotions? And what I would say to that is we can influence our emotions in the direction that we want them to go. If we want to experience more emotional stability in our lives, and if we want to experience more of those positive emotions, we're going to have to embark on a journey of self-care and self-discovery. So that we are expressing ourselves authentically, so that we're surrounding ourselves with people who uplift us and inspire us, so that we're doing things that we're passionate about and give us purpose. And trust me, if you do all of those things, you will experience a lot more positive emotions in your life. You'll experience the whole gamut of emotions, but what you can do is change your relationship with those quote-unquote negative emotions and experience them as learning opportunities, and you can really enjoy the pleasant emotions— joy, peace, freedom, positivity, all that great stuff. Okay, I hope that answers your question. And if you guys live in the LA area and you are looking for a therapist and you think I might be a good fit, I would love to hear from you. I will leave my phone number at the bottom of this video so that you could get a hold of me if you're interested in seeking psychotherapy. So I hope that this video is helpful, and take good care until next time. Bye!
